The Thievery of GitHub Copilot | Hacker News Reader

The Thievery of GitHub Copilot

medium.com

> Expediting public use and adoption of tech helps solidify…

… helps solidify what? Am I the only one for whom the article just ends there?

> More importantly, any algorithmic bias and oppression antics embedded in the codebase will be even further entrenched, disseminated and deployed unchecked.

I personally blame the scrum masters. Not that I know what that is but it surely is bad because, you know, “master”.

Who knew that MS was actually short for M/S!

Always strange to me that programmers complain about copilot “stealing” code but are fine with it “stealing” art. Can’t have it both ways.

that’s not true … maybe in your circles. but many people (that are also programmers) are outraged that artists’ work are being used as training data without consent

I don’t think the article mentioned art one way or the other.

But, the very first sentence seems like it could apply to art as well, where GitHub Copilot could be replaced with any of the generative AI models out there used for art.

> GitHub Copilot intentionally severs the relationship between creator and creation. This purposefully, yet painstaking act is accomplished by 1) stripping the humanity that’s uniquely part of the creator to make the creation and then 2) monetizing the creation immediately.

It's not really a question of what it's used for, but what it's used with.

Training on all the Old Masters and all public domain art? No problem.

Training on people's work posted on the internet to which they retain copyright? Not fine.

Training on Microsoft's own huge codebase for their tool, and calling for voluntary authorizations from the public? Fine.

Hoovering it up with not so much as a by your leave, effectively creating a license filter that sells the output as copyrightable?

Well you know.

(edited for tone, I get pissed about this...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com